Advances in plasma and cleaning processing have facilitated the growth in the semiconductor industry. In plasma processing, different recipes may be utilized to perform substrate processing. Recipes are generally complex and require the users, such as process engineers, to not only be knowledgeable about the recipes but also about the processing system hardware that execute the recipes. As discussed herein, a processing system may include, but are not limited to, a plasma processing system and a cleaning processing system.
A method that may be commonly employed to create a recipe is the process of manually entering values onto a tabular document, such as a large monolithic spreadsheet (LMS). The LMS allows users the flexibility to enter and change values. However, the LMS may be unduly large in terms of the number of values that may be gathered. Typically, a recipe may include about 50 steps. For each step, about 250 parameters (e.g., bias power, top power, chamber pressure, type of gas, etc.) may be defined. In addition, for each parameter, the user may have to enter 3 values: setpoint, soft tolerance, and hard tolerance. Thus, for a typical recipe, about 30,000 to 40,000 values may have to be manually entered by the user.
To facilitate discussion, FIG. 1 shows a simplified diagram of a production environment utilizing a manual tabular recipe document. After a recipe has been entered onto a LMS 102, LMS 102 is uploaded via a path 108 onto a process control module (PCM) 104, such as a computer, that may control a processing system hardware 106. PCM 104 may send parameters for each step via a path 10 from LMS 102 to processing system hardware 106. Processing system hardware 106 may utilize the parameters from LMS 102 to process a substrate. As a recipe step is completed, plasma processing hardware 106 may send data request via a path 112 to PCM 104 to retrieve the next step in the recipe.
Since the data on LMS 102 are manually entered by the user, the process may be prone to human error. In order for the user to ensure that accurate values are being supplied, the user may have to possess the skills and knowledge about the recipe and processing system hardware. Also, the overwhelming number of values that the user may have to supply in the creation of the recipe may provide opportunities for wrong values to be entered. Further, LMS 102 may not be protected, enabling the user or someone else to add or delete parameters. Thus, the user may enter erroneous data causing costly substrate waste. One skilled in the art is aware that “bad recipes,” such as recipes with invalid data, account for more than half of the costly substrate waste in some production environments.
In addition, the process of entering data into LMS 102 may not be integrated with processing system hardware 106. Thus, even a user who may be proficient in creating recipes, in general, may have a difficult time determining whether the values entered onto LMS 102 are compatible with the configuration settings of processing system hardware 106. Consequently, a recipe that is incompatible with the configuration settings of the processing system hardware may cause sever damages to expensive hardware.
To minimize the risk of human error, some substrate manufacturers may employ a method of hard-coding the recipes. However, this method provides users with little or no flexibility for making legitimate changes to the recipes. Instead, updates to the recipes may generally require time-consuming and/or costly software code changes. There are several disadvantages associated with prior art methods of creating recipes. For example, recipes that have been hard-coded require software supports that make updates and adjustments to recipes a burdensome process. On the other hand, manual LMS provide users with the flexibility of entering the data, but presents many opportunities for erroneous data entry.